A bomb blast killed three people and wounded 11 in one of Baghdad’s main squares on Thursday as the interim defence minister said restoring security to the capital was top priority for the new government.
The force of the explosion levelled a building on Tahrir Square in the capital’s commercial heart, one of a series of attacks around the country that left a total of 11 people dead and 20 wounded.
Interim Defence Minister Salam al-Zubayi said law and order needed to be re-established in Baghdad before other parts of the country could be wrested from the control of Sunni Arab insurgents.
”If we manage to establish peace in Baghdad, the heart of Iraq, this would send a strong signal to other regions in the country,” said Zubayi, who himself hails from the disenchanted former elite community.
The minister said an action plan for securing the capital was already being implemented but gave no details.
Zubayi holds his post on an interim basis after Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki failed to forge a consensus on nominations to the three main security posts before presenting his Cabinet line-up to Parliament last week.
Al-Maliki said progress was being made on the appointments of defence and interior ministers as well as an intelligence chief but declined to go into details.
”Some names have been put forward but we can not publicise them until negotiations are over,” he said.
”The issue of selecting the ministers of defence and interior will be finalised within the time limits set out,” he added, referring to a weekend deadline.
The interior ministry said the building flattened in Tahrir Square had been used by insurgents for producing makeshift bombs.
In other violence, a nine-year-old girl was killed when her family’s car hit a roadside bomb near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.
Four police officers were killed on their way home in the restive western city of Ramadi.
Authorities also reported three kidnappings and the discovery of the bodies of six people believed to have been killed in sectarian revenge murders.
Among those kidnapped was a judge from the town of Dujail, the focus of crimes-against-humanity charges against ousted president Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants over the killing of nearly 150 Shi’ite civilians in the 1980s.
Dujail Judge Walid Ahmed was travelling on a road between Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit and the city of Samarra when he was abducted from his car on Wednesday, an interior ministry source said.
Saddam and his fellow accused faced the death penalty if convicted in the trial, which is currently hearing defence witness testimony that the killings were executions carried out with due process after an assassination attempt against the president in the town just north of the capital.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair — who met al-Maliki in Baghdad earlier this week — was meanwhile headed for Washington for talks with United States President George Bush on Iraq’s future.
The two main coalition leaders were not intending to set a timetable for the withdrawal of their troops, officials on both sides of the Atlantic said.
But it is clear they are banking on the new government in Baghdad to help extricate themselves from an increasingly costly troop commitment that is drawing mounting domestic opposition.
An influential think-tank, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned that the coalition might actually have to deploy more troops to pave the way for a drawdown in the longer term.
”The danger is clear — an increase in instability, violence and radical Islamism,” the think-tank warned, adding that there were already about 20 000 fighters in insurgent ranks.
”The alternative would be a larger role for overt, coordinated, multilateral intervention, involving the key regional powers, to stabilise the situation.”
US regional arch-foe Iran is sending Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to Baghdad on Friday for talks with leaders of the new government, a Parliamentary official said. — AFP
